


I Couldn’t Help Picturing Us

by apanoplyofsong



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 17:30:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5594830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apanoplyofsong/pseuds/apanoplyofsong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke Griffin knows strength and pain intimately; knows what she's searching for; knows what she needs to do at the end of the day.<br/>Bellamy Blake comes in somewhere along the way.</p><p>[A <i>Jessica Jones</i> inspired AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Couldn’t Help Picturing Us

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by Netflix's _Jessica Jones_ series. If you haven't seen it, 1) I recommend it 2) I don't think this has major spoilers for it, but I make no promises and 3) it should still be understandable. It's more inspired by the feel of that universe, the bare bones and some dialogue. There are concurrent timelines present here, which hopefully make sense.
> 
> ALSO: I want to emphasize that while I do _not_ include or touch on any of the issues of rape present in the series, and in my world it has not occurred to any of these characters, mind control is still present which inherently leads to issues of consent. However, this is very definitively never used in any sexual situation in this fic. All depicted intimacies are consensual. Violence is otherwise present at slightly less than a canon-typical level. Please use your own discretion if you think you may be triggered by anything here. 
> 
> Title from _Jessica Jones_.

 

 

 

She stumbles into his bar one night, already a few whiskeys down. He's handsome in his sharpness—eyes that cut dark and fierce, hair a storm on his head, freckles incongruent with his edges. 

She glares when the glass he sets down is clear instead of amber. 

"Drink the water, Princess."

"It's Clarke, actually." But she takes the cup in hand anyway. 

He tips his head, smirk crooked. "Bellamy." 

Later, after she's sobered up through greasy food and conversation and they've already gone one round in his apartment upstairs, he thrusts into her hard enough for her to hear the hinges of his bed shake and _God_ it feels good to witness destruction that's not at her own hands. 

"Sorry," he murmurs, and ducks his head into her neck, slowing his breath and his hips until they're moving at a pace that borders on intimate. 

She grips his shoulder, lets her nails bite. "I won't break." It's a challenge, she knows, but she has fought too hard not to be made of glass. 

"Yes," he says, and looks at her, eyes burning and clear. "You will." But his hips snap again and he chases her orgasm with a ferocity that makes her forget.

 

* * *

 

In the stories she’s heard from the few people she’s talked to, they’re never sure exactly how it happens. They just wake up one morning and realize their arm reaches the top shelf where before it couldn’t stretch or turn a key in the lock only to have it melt in their hand.

Clarke, however, knows exactly when it starts. She is 10, in the back of her father’s car after calling him to pick her up from a sleepover early.

All she remembers of the impact is a swerving truck, the way glass glittered like ice crystals, and waking up covered in something thick and sticky as syrup. Her father was already dead in the front seat.

She tears the dress for his funeral in half trying to unzip it. On the morning after her mother finally tells her she has to return to school, the arm that had been broken 8 days before smashes her alarm clock into pieces.

She’s learned to hide her strength better since then.

 

* * *

 

Some things haunt her. She can't stop searching for them.

Later, when she is following this whisper of a man, a man who incites riots with his words but doesn't stick around to hear the roar, Bellamy comes into her mind instead. 

He didn't seem the kind to be afraid to shout. 

When she goes back to his bar that night, it's to find him surrounded by a group of men simmering with the acridity of beer and anger. 

There’s a punch, the space where she should hear two bones crunching, and she doesn’t think before she acts. Clarke throws a man by his shoulder when he moves to swing at her, lands an uppercut that leaves another heaving against the splintering bar, and tosses a third into the street with a single hand. She turns around, fingers still flexing slightly, just in time to see Bellamy watching her as another man’s knife bounces off his neck. He rolls his eyes and flips the guy onto his back with ease.

The room is quiet. There’s the barely-there hum of ancient neon and the way the wood of the bar is breathing, but her eyes are still locked with Bellamy’s as he stares her down, face proud and irritated and neutral all at once. He turns around when her heartbeat makes it impossible to hear anything else.

“Shots for everyone, on the house,” Bellamy says, breaking the heavy air. The stoic man behind the behind the bar gets to work as the crowd murmurs their approval.

She takes her chance at slipping out the door, slipping away from here, slipping away from _him_ because—this? This isn’t her.

Clarke doesn’t show herself to anyone. She doesn’t lose control. She doesn’t expose her power unwittingly.

The last time she had left her with a body count she’ll never shake.

He grabs her arm before her feet meet the threshold. She shouldn’t have come. She shouldn’t have done this. She shouldn’t have thought she could get away with having something good twice.

She meets his gaze anyway.

“I saw you.” His voice is low and graveled, sliding under the din of the space.

Clarke raises her jaw, eyes turned fierce. A queen preparing for destruction.

“I saw you, and you saw me.” He moves towards her with his words, slides his hand down to her wrist.

It is softer, somehow.

She finds her way back upstairs.

 

* * *

 

Her mother never questions it, never searches out causes or answers or solutions. She never mentions it, never speaks of it in anything more than hushed _be careful_ s and the wall she erects around them when they step into public.

Clarke figures it’s Abby’s way of trying to distance herself from the crash, from the _“gifts”_ and loss that echoed in its wake.

Clarke doesn’t have that luxury.

She turns 18 and puts in request after request with public information offices until she has the name of the company contracting the tanker truck that made her this way. That took her father from her.

**Mount Weather Research Corp.** , printed clear and crisp across the paper in her hand.

It took her years to find, but they won’t get anything else from her.

 

* * *

 

Lexa’s the last one who saw her, really. That was the last time she let herself forget she couldn’t stay.

Things had been good, casual, for a few weeks before Lexa saw Clarke open a barred steel door in one push and, well. If Clarke knew the person she was seeing harbored deep-seated resentment against powers, she’d probably want out, too.

The tension is quiet, thick, when Bellamy stands across from her in his apartment.

“Did you know?”

His arms are crossed, brow furrowed, streetlights cutting through the window casting all of him in harsh lines.

She shifts, slightly, makes herself stand tall. “Know what?”

“Did you know about me when we had sex? Or before that? Was this some sort of…I don’t know, some sort of fucked up plan for you?”

“No.” She holds his eye. “I didn’t know.”

He watches her, careful, intent, then nods finally. Relaxes against his desk.

“So, what’s your thing? Strength?”

She nods. “Yeah. You?”

He holds out his hand, turning it in the light, grin small and wry. “Unbreakable skin. A little bit of the strength, too.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” He studies her, eyes traveling her body, calculating quietly. “I haven’t actually met another one of us before. Experiment?”

“Accident.”

“Know anyone else like this?”

She shutters, face turning cold.

Clarke doesn’t answer.

Bellamy doesn’t ask again.

She stumbles from his home once more as the sun starts to rise; this time decidedly less satisfied.

 

* * *

 

She finds their headquarters eventually, after digging through files of sub-contractors and shell companies, innocuously placed in an Alexandria industrial complex just across the river.

Their research facilities are off site.

Those she finds nestled in a field shielded from the road by a grove of trees, tucked into some forgotten Virginia valley. The only sign that marks the unsettling cement and glass building is a piece of slate with **MTW** carved into the side.

Breaking in isn’t difficult—she pinches the lenses of a few cameras closed, shoulders open the dead-bolted security doors.

Inside, it becomes clear they’re more concerned about things getting out. The hallways are stark white and empty, lined with doors she recognizes as bearing at least three reinforcement bars, the kind even she has to push to get through. Each door has a small circle of thick glass, just above her head. She stands on tiptoe to peer into one and immediately falls back, checks the next and the next, feels her stomach drop as she confirms what she’s been dreading.

People. That’s what they have locked away in vaults. People hooked up to machines or locked up like animals or hung upside down. They’re experimenting on them, _mauling_ them, trying to turn them into God knows what.

Trying to turn them into her.

She’s on the third floor, examining a room with at least twenty people crammed into it, all looking sickly and thin, when a voice makes her whirl around, reach for a weapon she doesn’t have.

“I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you should leave. Now.” It’s a woman around Clarke’s age, limping towards her from a corner of the hallway Clarke didn’t see, heavily favoring her left side as she moves.

“Why should I trust you?” The woman’s dressed in the off-green hospital gown the facility seems to prefer, but Clarke’s not trusting anything she finds here.

That is, until the other woman turns to the side and Clarke sees a long, jagged scar, raised and angry and purple, winding down the side of her left thigh. Her mother’s a doctor, Clarke’s seen injuries all her life, but she still sucks her breath in with a hiss at the sight.

“Because I’m getting the fuck out. You can either help me, or get out of my way.”

Clarke can’t help everyone here. Not right now, not unprepared for what she’s found. But she can help this one woman get away.

She moves to her side.

Closer, Clarke has the chance to study her companion—the dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail gone limp, the bronze skin that bears a pallor, the eyes tired but cutting. The two women make it across the field, into Clarke’s waiting car, and drive towards the clinic where Abby is working.

That’s how Clarke Griffin meets Raven Reyes.

It’s also the first time she catches his attention, but she doesn’t know that until later.

 

* * *

 

Clarke doesn’t trust the quiet. She knows something’s coming.

One day the news shows what she’s feared. The entirety of Union Station, stopped. People frozen in their tracks, staring straight ahead, unmoving for hours on end. Raven is on the phone with her within the minute, and they both agree.

Cage’s influence is growing.

Bellamy shows up at her door that evening, fists clenched and hair frayed. He walks in as soon as she opens the door.

“Is he the one you knew about? The one you wouldn’t talk about?” he demands.

She nods, mute. His hand reaches his hair again, tugs.

“Fuck, Clarke. My sister was there. That goddamn _monster_ had my little sister rooted in one spot for six fucking hours because she was getting on a train to New York.”

She steps forward, puts her hand on his arm. She can feel his life pulsing through the veins under her fingers, hot and hard. She wonders if she ever felt that alive.

“I’m going to get him.”

He looks at her, nods, and asks how he can help.

Later, they sit with their backs pressed against her wall, half-empty bottle of bourbon nestled between them. She tells him in fragments about what she knows, what she experienced, what she _did_. Things only Raven knows. Everything except the final piece.

She lays out the blood on her hands.

He looks at her then, eyes soft and fierce and gravitational in the dark.

“It’s not your fault, Clarke.” He grabs her wrist, presses down on her pulse so she can feel its echo. “Who we are, and what we do to survive…those are different things. It’s not your fault.”

“I’m not sure I can believe you.”

“Fine. You want forgiveness? I forgive you. I’ll forgive you every day until you do.”

His fingers slide down between hers. She watches them, lets her head thud against the wall, lets herself lean into his side. Lets herself forget, just for a moment, who they are, what they’re in the middle of.

He does the same.

 

* * *

 

Raven is a failed experiment, technically. She went to Mount Weather when she was 21 and desperate, unable to make ends meet while she took classes, without savings after her mother syphoned them all. They tried slicing her leg open, implanting their chemicals into her bone. She’s one that survived, she says.

Clarke has trouble thinking of her as a failed anything.

Raven is brilliant and fierce, committed in her love once she chooses where her loyalties lie. She chooses Clarke.

The one time Clarke asks about her experience sober, Raven goes silent, sitting still and entranced for minutes before she looks up, somber and serious in a way Clarke hasn’t seen before.

“They think they’re creating heroes, but really they’re making monsters. They haven’t figured out that heroes aren’t made in a lab.” The look she gives Clarke makes a weight settle deep in her stomach, heavy and dark with understanding.

Within a week of her escape, Raven starts working with Clarke to discover what Mount Weather’s doing, how they’re doing it, the ways they’re sourcing subjects. Their shared insight helps a bit, but there’s not much more than that. Every document, every official, every agency that should be monitoring the corporation leads to nowhere.

They try the hero thing, in their downtime. It starts unintentionally, when Clarke saves a neighbor’s kid, Charlotte, while walking down her street one day; stops an errant car from hitting her. The engine crumbles, and that’s hard to hide. Raven creates tech that Clarke couldn’t even imagine, lays out safeguards and tracking systems, installs programs that alert Clarke’s phone when she might be needed.

Generally, Clarke sticks to small things—rescuing an overly ambitious cat that gets stuck between the wall and the radiator, changing flat tires, stopping harassment from assholes on the street—to avoid drawing much attention to herself. But, occasionally, there’s something bigger, like Charlotte, because it feels _good_ to know she’s helping people, that she’s making their lives a little better, even if she can’t be a surgeon like her mother or a human rights lawyer like Wells. She can still make some kind of difference, just as herself.

That’s how Cage finds her.

Clarke is walking back from the store one night, plastic bag of the cheapest beer she could find at Safeway thumping against her leg, when she hears yelling.

She turns the corner to find three men surrounding another, a gun clutched in one of their hands, the other two fighting with fists.

“I’d get out of here if I were you.” She stalks towards them, letting her boots beat loudly against the pavement. Her warning.

She hears them scoff, mutter words like _bitch_ and _crazy_ that puff in the cool air. She sets her beer down on the trunk of a car.

“Now, that wasn’t very nice.”

She takes the guy with the gun out first, swings an elbow into his trachea and kicks the weapon so it scatters down the end of the street. The next she punches—adrenaline driving her fist harder than she intends—so he’s thrown against the wall behind them, small bits of plaster floating in the air as he slumps, and the third runs. Before she can check on the man they were mugging, she hears a voice behind her.

“Well, that was impressive.”

Something slithers down her spine. She turns to find a man a little older than her, somewhere on either edge of thirty, with eyes that remind her of a copperhead before it strikes.

“Come here.”

Her feet are moving towards him before she can tell him to fuck off, though she hears the words echo in her mind, feels some part trying to plant her feet, fight back against the motion. Too much of her wants to go, _needs_ to go.

His smile is an oil slick.

“What’s your name?”

“Clarke Griffin.” It’s pulled from her. His eyes glint.

“Tell me about yourself, Clarke Griffin.”

She does.

The beer’s still sitting on the trunk for a stranger to pick up the next morning.

 

* * *

 

She's not proud of who she's become, not exactly. But she can live with it most days now, at least until the sky turns dark. 

She tells Bellamy she's fine. Tells him she's spent 8 years perfecting her Freedom of Information Act request; that she's made her way as a paralegal and later a private investigator. She leaves out that they're an attempt to make herself feel good, decent...human. 

He asks anyway.

Days turn over each other as they search for Cage. Clarke ends most of them in a corner booth at _Blake’s_ with a basket of fries and a glass of whiskey. Bellamy appears beside her during lulls, towel still slung over one broad shoulder, sometimes bearing more food, never bearing a refill. His brows are always drawn as he surveys the scene, checks in, and Clarke’s pretty sure he doesn’t think she eats outside of his place.

She tries to keep Raven out of it, but occasionally she sends Clarke links to various reports—a sommelier in the heart of the city fired for comping a $600 bottle of wine, despite having no intentions to do so; a man in the suburbs who seemingly gave his Mercedes Benz to a stranger without cause. Little pieces that point to Cage having been there. Clarke knows that, despite her protests, Raven’s likely carrying on her own investigation. She can’t really blame her. They’ve both earned that.

After Bellamy closes, they go upstairs and work until dawn threatens. Some nights they fuck, some nights they touch, some nights they do nothing at all.

She never stays. It’s too close to being something she wants. She tries not to let herself want anymore, but his hands are soft on her, his eyes sure and certain, and it’s harder than it’s ever been.

She lets herself get grungy; doesn’t change her clothes, lets her hair grow greasy and tangled. It’ll piss Cage off more when he finds her.

And he will find her.

On Bellamy’s day off, he shows up at her place with Chinese takeout and supermarket tabloids. They sit cross-legged on her bed, eating noodles out of their cartons and searching through alien abduction stories and celebrity gossip for anything that might help take Cage down.

It’s comfortable, strangely. Clarke hasn’t felt that in a while.

He falls asleep with his back pressed against the headboard she bought from Goodwill when she moved to DC from the suburbs years ago, legs spread out across the worn floral of her comforter. She lets herself look at him—the way his chest rises and falls under a threadbare gray shirt; the lines of his cheekbones that soften every time he talks about his sister, or every time he touches her; the dip in his chin she wants to press her thumb up against.

He feels safe and she wants to lean into it, wants to wrap herself around him and forget Cage and the world and the way things seem to dirty at her touch and the way Bellamy appears to smooth down her edges without even knowing. It’s such a dangerous thing to want. She sits next to him, slides her hand underneath his instead.

“I’m a mess, Bell.” She keeps her voice quiet so she won’t disturb him. “I know I’m a mess. I can’t bring anyone else into that. But somehow you still fuck me up.”

She’s almost desperate now, words hushed and harsh in their hurry, chest tight with how _undone_ she feels. “How do you do that? Why can I see a future with you, when I know that can’t happen? When I know that’s not fair.”

The room is quiet, a soft hum from the fan on the ceiling circulating air, and she lets her thumb graze lightly over his knuckles, skin unmarred by the papercuts and bruises and fresh scars that mark her own.

“I can’t help picturing it, though. I can’t help picturing _us_ , how we could be, maybe, if the world wasn’t the way it is. If it was a world we could have a future in. That could maybe be nice, I think.”

She’s still studying his hand when it squeezes slightly around hers, one beat, then two, and when she looks up his eyes are still closed, the slightest upturn evident in his lips. His head shifts slightly against the wall, resettling, and she waits until she’s sure he’s fully, deeply under before she draws her hand from his.

After a woman in a pea coat with a dazed look in her eye hands Clarke a photo of herself on the street, she starts getting calls. A different message from a different voice on her machine each morning.

“He wants to know why you don’t wear your hair like you used to. It was so pretty in braids.”

“Dresses always did suit you better than those old jeans, you know.”

“Blue is more your color, dear.”

One time, it’s just the strands of orchestration playing on loop. Her nails tear into the table and she has to hang up before she can lose her mind.

Bellamy gets angry in a way she hasn’t seen since Union Station when he finds out, burning brightly all around her. She doesn’t want to think about why. Doesn’t want to think about what she said, how she feels. There’s not time for that.

Bellamy finally asks the question he’s been avoiding, for all he knows of her.

“Why does he want you? Why, in a place with six million people, are you the one he’s after?”

She meets his eye, wry and resolute.

“He doesn’t want it to spread,” she says. “He can’t control me anymore.”

 

* * *

 

At first, it’s all small things. Clarke puts on the dresses he likes, keeps her hair in sheets of shimmering gold or braids that loop her head, stays in his extravagant Capitol Hill townhouse. Records of symphonies, rooted in strings meant to speak on the devil and his place in society and humanity, are always filtering out of the library, imbuing her every step with a heavy weight. The part of her that's still _her_ , that's pacing a room at the back of her mind, that wants to snap Cage's heirloom furniture in half every time he asks her, tells her, _compels_ her to do something, recognizes that it's probably best to go along with these things anyway. He's not touching her, not using her physically in any way, and she doesn't really want to risk that.

She keeps track of the days she’s with him, makes herself repeat them back in every down moment she has. After the first week, the fog his control slips through her head grows thicker, makes it harder to reach out to places she’s sure still hold her. On the tenth day, she overhears him demand to speak to Dante Wallace on a phone call and her blood runs cold. She knows that name. She remembers the ink that stained her fingers when she ran over it repeatedly, a single line marked _founder_ on the very last page of her file on Mount Weather.

Cage’s father.

It becomes easier to assume what he wants from her, then. It makes it less difficult to fight against the haze when she can, too.

She’s no longer worried about herself. She’s scared for others, what he might make her do to them. What Mount Weather might make her do.

He starts out petty when he finally orders her to use her powers. The neighbor’s patio music annoys him, so Cage has her tear through the speakers. Clarke does so easily. When she pulls her hand back from the wiry mess with blood dripping off her fingertips, her face is blank from the spell he yields and his is calculating, considering. Testing.

It escalates slightly each time, always with Cage watching closely, always with a tint of satisfaction to his glee.

She hates the parts of herself that want to keep making him happy.

One day, he has them driven north of the city to a Baltimore junkyard entrance where cars wait, lined in a row.

“Impress me,” Cage says, waves towards a beat up Pontiac and the Impalas with rusting hoods framing either side.

She tears holes through the metal of each one.

Three days later, she’s brought to a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Cage is standing next to her, her hand resting on his elbow—the closest she’s ever been. Though her face is placating, a thin fog of Cage-induced calm greasing her mind, it makes the skin on the back of her neck crawl. In the four weeks she’s been with him, it’s never stopped itching.

“I’m glad you’re here, Clarke. I think we’re going to do great things together.”

He leads her inside.

The doors are made of thick metal and the space echoes when they close. Everything is stark, dark for a moment, and then her eyes adjust.

The room itself is plain—just braced sheet metal with one large rolling dock door at the end. But instead of boxes, barrels, pallets, it’s filled with people. Spreading out from the center of the space in perfect concentric circles are men and women staring straight ahead, bodies tight and standing at attention. The sounds of an orchestra slip through the room and, as if she’s living some sadistically directed movie, the music crescendos as she zeroes in on the epicenter.

Wells. Wide-eyed and tied to a chair, the line of blood running from nose to chin cut across by a gag.

Wells, who she grew up next door to.

Wells, who she didn’t speak to for a _year_ after her father died, after she got her powers, because she was wrecked and scared and angry; who smiled and welcomed her in for pizza night when she finally showed back up on his front step.

Wells, whose father controls a powerful Senate committee; who was the first person she ever learned to love that didn’t share her blood. Wells, who is good and true and who she _cannot let get killed_.

The mist in her mind snaps taut, each individual drop vibrating sharply, waiting for the command to rise or fall.

“I would introduce you two, but I understand you’re familiar.” Cage walks to the center of the space as if a carpet had been laid out for him, eyes pinched and glinting and sharp in a way that makes Clarke feel sick.

She stands frozen, eyes locked on Wells, afraid if she blinks it may be too late.

She knows what’s coming, but her gut sinks anyway.

“You, Clarke, are going to help me send a message to Senator Jaha. I have told him that it’s in his best interest to approve a particular set of upcoming legislation, but, well. It seems he may be more of a visual learner.” Cage smiles, all teeth, and stops directly in front of Wells, forcing Clarke to meet his stare.

“Come here,” Cage orders. Her feet move though her teeth grind, though every vessel in her body thrums against it. She stands a few feet in front of him.

“It really is fortuitous that we met. You’re going to make things so much easier.” Cage looks every bit the evil mastermind and Clarke wants to spit on his face, rip his scalp open by his stupidly over-gelled hair, knee him in the solar plexus without holding back but she _can’t_ , because some assholes don’t understand why it’s wrong to take away personal agency.

He smiles and steps to the side, and Clarke bites down on the inside of her cheek, hard. “You’re going to hit Mr. Jaha, Clarke. You’re going to hit him until I tell you to stop, if I tell you to stop.” Clarke hears his words, feels them tug at that invisible thread connecting them, but all she can see is Wells’ eyes, large and dark, calmly locked with hers. She can hear his voice rolling around in her head, echoing off the first time she pulled his car door off its hinges when they were 16 and didn’t know what to do— _it’s okay, Clarke. It’s okay_.

The thread snaps, and the drops fall. “No,” she says, quiet at first, having to bite the word out.

Then again, louder.

“No. You want to fuck things up; you want to mess with politicians, with their sons? Do it yourself. Have that on your own hands, your own conscious, if you still have one left. I’m done. I’m out.” She pauses, twists her face into something reminiscent of his own sneer. “You don’t control me anymore.”

Cage’s face flashes with rage, and then smooths into the implacable, self-assured mask he always wears.

“Oh, Clarke. I really wish you hadn’t said that.”

He claps three times, precise and echoing through the warehouse’s air, and Clarke strides closer to him, back ramrod straight, hands already fists, adrenaline itching through her veins with the need to take his head off.

Then the whole space turns to chaos.

The people filling the room spring into action all at once, surrounding Clarke with faces full of vengeance. She _knows_ they’re compelled, knows they’re probably people Cage pulled from the bank or the street or a church, but they are coming for her with a single minded focus to tear her heart out and she can’t think of that now. So she swings, knocks a tall blonde woman in Army fatigues to the floor with a _thunk_ , barely catches sight of the name “Byrne” stitched to the cloth before a man is rushing her, hands around her throat until Clarke twists his neck. She doesn’t even see Cage leave.

The rest of the fight is a blur. They keep coming in waves, undeterred by bruises or ruptured skin or broken bones. The only way they stop is when they’re unresponsive. Eventually, everyone is on the ground and Clarke is the only person left standing over the wreckage, shaking and barely whole.

By the time she guides Wells out of the building, his arm swung around her shoulder so she can bear the brunt of his weight, there’s a trail of bodies behind her—some breathing, some not. She doesn’t have the energy to check, but blood makes her shoes stick every time she steps.

The ACLU offers Wells a position in New York within the month, and Clarke has a truck packed before he can even officially accept. It’s not far, but it’s safer. It’s something.

She’s going to find a way to make this right.

 

* * *

 

As time keeps moving, Clarke’s feelings—her affinity, her admiration, her _draw_ to Bellamy in more than a physical way—get harder to hide from.

She shoves them downs, places careful weights over the way Bellamy feels when he trembles under her hand or under her lips, the quiet whispers he speaks in when he talks about his mother, the way she’s learned parts of him as well as her own, the way her always-racing heartbeat slows when he’s near. It’s too much, and she’s too broken, doesn’t trust herself to do this again.

Tucked up in Bellamy’s apartment against the early spring chill one night, he reaches for her in a way that ignites her blood. It all breaks to the surface. 

"I shouldn't stay."

His jaw ticks. "Why not?"

"I can't...I don't do this. I won't." She doesn't meet his eye. 

It is quiet for a moment. 

"What are you running from here, Clarke? Don't tell me this is all about Cage, because I won't believe you."

She snaps her head, looks at him, feels something flare deep within her core. "I can't lose you too, okay?! I can't lose another thing to this goddamn fight. I can’t let another thing get broken because of me." Her voice quiets, eyes lower, and she feels vulnerable, raw under all her fire. “Everything gets broken because of me.”

He is still, then reaches for her face. His fingertips are calloused against her cheek, remnants of his before. 

"I'm not going anywhere."

"You don't know that."

His lips tilt a little, wry. "No, I guess not. But that would true without Cage, too. You don't want him to take something else from you?" His hand tightens slightly, tilts her chin to meet his face. "Then don't let him. Don't let him keep you from this before it's even begun. Not if you want it." 

She closes her eyes, lets herself lean against his frame. 

When she breathes in, it is only him.

Then, slowly and suddenly, it is his lips and his body around hers and the way she feels wrapped against his skin. Her name catches on the edges his teeth, her breath curving through his lips, and she grabs onto it; the warmth sliding through her chest, the press of all his lines against her, the way he sounds, gentle and reverent, as he coaxes her onward.

When he's carding his fingers and mouth through the curls between her thighs, thumbing at her in the way that makes them both sigh, her hand finds the fingers spanning her hip and she thinks _yeah, it's better like this_. Because she can stay.

So Clarke laces their fingers and lets herself fall.

Later, she lies awake, head pillowed against Bellamy’s torso, watching the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest as he sleeps. Her phone vibrates mutedly on his old wooden nightstand and she reaches out for it instinctively, sliding open the banner and typing in her passcode from muscle memory to see a message from Raven.

Her heart ticks, and she has to harden.

_Raven Reyes, 2:53am  
Found him_.

_Clarke Griffin, 2:54am  
At Blake’s, come get me?_

_Raven Reyes, 2:54am  
Already on my way._

Clarke slips from Bellamy’s arm, the warm nest that they’ve created, and pads around the room, slipping on clothes as she finds them and tucking her phone into the back pocket of her worn-in jeans. She stands and just watches Bellamy for a moment once she’s dressed; tracing the way the city lights fall through the curtain to settle against the copper expanse of his skin, the way his arm is still flung out to his side to hold her and his hair lays reckless atop his head. He looks easy, weightless. She commits the sight to memory, just in case.

She can’t let him come. She knows he’ll hate her for it, hate her taking what he sees as an undue risk, but. She can’t risk _him_. This is too new, and too good, and she’s not used to having something precious. She’ll do what she can to protect it.

Clarke can’t risk Bellamy when she just got him. And this is something she has to bear herself.

Instead, she traces a finger softly down his face, follows it with the brush of her lips against his cheek, and whispers an apology into his ear. She’s the best person to deal with Cage, they both know that, and she hopes that will count towards bridging whatever this may bring.

Boots in hand, Clarke pads silently out of the room. She eases the apartment door shut behind her before slipping the shoes onto her bare feet and descending the stairs.

She’s been ready for this for a while.

Raven pulls up just as she’s reaching the corner, her old Honda screeching slightly at the turn, and Clarke slides in before the car has the chance to fully stop.

“He’s staying at a place outside of the city, out towards Harpers Ferry in the middle of nowhere,” Raven says, merging onto the Capital Beltway that loops the city with a white-knuckled grip. “We can expect it to be guarded.”

At this time of day, the road is quiet, and Clarke focuses the tires beating rhythmically against the braces of the bridge spanning the Potomac, the streetlights pulsing through the cab without interruption, the slip of her hair as she winds it into a braid. The carnage that’s certain to come.

“You know I can’t let you be there.”

Raven looks at her from the driver’s seat, unimpressed, as a flash of light cuts across her face, tan skin glowing orange in its touch. “Yeah, I know. But if anything goes wrong, if I don’t hear from you within half an hour, I’m calling Blake.”

“Bellamy shouldn’t—”

“He should, Clarke, and we both know it.” Her voice gentles slightly, still certain. “I would go in myself if it weren’t for my damn leg but…he should be there, should be the one I call. He _cares_ about you, and he’s the next best thing we have against Cage. I know you don’t want him there, I respect that, but he’s strong and if Cage gets ahold of him, he literally can’t hurt him before you get him back. Okay?”

A deep breath. “Okay.” Clarke turns to the window to watch the night.

They turn onto the interstate that parallels the course of the river, winding north through overpasses and underpasses as the earth starts to rise and the city’s touch begins to fade. They drive until the foothills of the mountains begin to well up around them and Raven exits onto a state highway, then turns west on a small road surrounded by trees that loom dark over them in the pre-dawn light.

Everything is still and quiet, as if the world is holding its breath alongside them.

Over an hour after they left, Raven turns the car onto a small narrow path lined with oak trees and pulls into a hidden cove. She nods to where the gravel turns a corner out of sight.

“It’s just up there. The best I could gather before we left was that it’s a house, some kind of distant family inheritance, and that there’s no recognizable security system. But there’ll be people instead.” She reaches out and grabs Clarke’s arm, digging her fingers until the bones are pressing together through their flesh. “Be safe.”

Clarke squeezes her hand and slips into the cool forest air.

The house is surprisingly easy to get into—it sits in a small clearing only slightly bigger than the structure itself, with two visibly armed guards monitoring the front periphery. The first tips of pink are just starting to inch towards the horizon, still well below the sky visible over the trees, and Clarke knows how to walk in the shadows, light-footed and silent under the sounds of the rousing forest. She waits until she’s past the guards to slip from the trees and make her way into the house.

Cage shows no surprise at seeing her.

“Ah, Miss Griffin! I was wondering when you would arrive.” His smile is all teeth and he’s dressed despite the early hour, a dark suit buttoned over his blue shirt, almost the same shade as Clarke’s eyes. She barely resists a snarl. There is music filtering through the air, and the back of her neck burns.

His voice still feels like grease as it slides down her skin, but now she can feel its slime, can see it fracture tiny rainbows in the light as it beads and rolls off like water.

“You know,” he says, walking a wide circle around her in the house’s open foyer, “my father heard about our last encounter and didn’t approve. He thought it would be more beneficial to _ask_ you how your…transformation was successful than to utilize you.” Cage’s eyes glint sickly as he stops. “Luckily, I can still see how you’d be useful, even with your difficulty.”

“You know this can’t go on, Cage.”

He hums, steps back towards where the space widens. “Yes, I know. It’s unfortunate, isn’t it? We could have done so much together.” His face shifts, vicious. “Oh well.”

Clarke is stepping towards him and suddenly it is everything she dreams about again, all the nightmares that keep her awake and press her back against pillows when she sleeps. Men flow out into the room, surrounding Cage, swarming her, and she swings elbows like she’s practiced again and again, hitting so they’re unconscious but still breathing, aching but alive. She works her way towards Cage as he is moved further back and he watches. She’s so close she can almost feel his pulse writhing under her hands, can feel the finality of ending this all, when she looks up from where a man whose leg she’d swept had fallen and Cage is gone.

There is a sharp sting on the back of her head, the scuffle of boots, and everything goes black.

Clarke wakes to a throbbing pain and fingers carding against her scalp. The world is moving in a way that’s familiar, but she can’t quite grasp it yet. Bellamy is peering over her when she opens her eyes, a furrow in his brow and a tiny upturn to his lips when he sees her stir against the upholstery of the backseat. The sky is a rich blue around them and Raven drives, the car filled with the scrape of tires against asphalt and the occasional clunk of metal echoing over a pothole.

“What happened?” Her tongue feels heavy and the words come out wrong, thick and scratching. Blood is trickling across her knuckles when she moves to sit and the flesh under her cheek stings in the air.

Bellamy is still staring at her, rubbing his thumb across her temple as if him studying her, steadying her, is what’s keeping her tethered to the ground. Clarke’s not altogether certain he’s wrong.

Raven huffs. “It went wrong. The road started getting traffic, a lot of traffic, as soon as you left the car. I called Blake; we got you out of there.” The added dip in her voice gives away the narrowed eyes, pursed lips when she speaks again. “Cage was already gone by the time we got in.”

Clarke look at Bellamy, wills him to understand, and he leans forward until his forehead brushes hers.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and it sounds a little better, her breath bouncing off his cheek back onto hers. “I had to do it.”

His eyes pour over her, dark and endless and searching, but he nods, ever so slightly, skin touching skin. “I know you did.”

Clarke grabs his wrist, presses her fingers against the heat of his flesh, and closes her eyes against the breaking of the day.

Later, she lets him dress her wounds, pull her into his chest, lay her down with him. She doesn't fight against wanting it. She lets herself burrow closer instead. 

"We're going to get him, Clarke." His words weave through her hair with his fingertips. 

"How do you know?" She sounds weaker than she wants, but says it anyway. 

"It's you and me. I know." He tightens the arm draped across her shoulders. “But we do it together, alright?”

“Yeah,” she says, presses her face against the skin over his heart. “Together.”

 

* * *

 

It seems fitting that, when they meet Cage again two weeks after Clarke approached him in that house alone, it’s in a warehouse. For him, it is a stage, no doubt, a full-circle moment in the play of his life. For Clarke, it is an opportunity to get things right.

The space is eerily reminiscent of the night that stained Clarke’s soul—the cavernous echoes of metal, the one wide docking bay spanning a wall, the clip of Cage’s shoes against the smooth floor. But, this time, light filters in through windows bridging the top of the building, the spring sun pulsing and spinning dust particles in a dance. Bellamy’s hand hangs inches from her right and she can hear the soft hinges of Raven’s brace settle to her left.

They are prepared. Raven and Bellamy both bear earplugs, and Raven has a switchblade in the pocket of her pants and a stun gun she modified into some wider directional transmitter tucked inside her leather jacket to make up for any weakness in her leg. Bellamy is unarmed but, at his insistence, Clarke has a small pistol tucked into the waistband of her jeans, the chill of the metal slowly warming to her body.

Bellamy’s eyes had gone dark when he watched Clarke practice with it, assuring him she could handle the gun, but she insisted they go in with nothing drawn.

“Cage doesn’t use weapons. He uses people. I want as few of them hurt as possible.”

He had nodded and pressed her up against a brick wall of the shooting range with his hips.

Now Cage stands silently, smugly, eerily alone, as they form a line in front of him. There should be no place for sounds to hide in the silence, but it still seems as if the people behind him appear without warning, a cluster of five forming on each of his sides. Cage smirks, tilts his head in their direction.

“I figured you deserved to see the results of our experiments. Nobody quite as good as you, of course; you’re a level unto yourself. But, nothing to scoff at.” He jerks his head and a man from the group to his right shoots towards the ceiling, arching in a perfect parabola before landing next to Cage, the concrete of the floor shaking ever so slightly as he braces himself against it. Beside her, Bellamy flinches, tenses at the sight.

Clarke clenches her fists until the blunt of her nails press into her skin, until her palms turn hot and pulsing. She thinks of the labs, of the emancipated and tortured people she saw, and wonders if any of the ones standing in front of her went willingly.

“We shouldn’t have to do this, Cage. You could just stop what you’re doing; stop controlling people, stop _using_ them.”

“Ah, but where’s the use in that?”

Clarke moves towards him, nodding her head at Bellamy and Raven as the signal for action, and Cage steps back, tipping two fingers towards each of his groups and motioning them forward. His eyes are glinting, burning under the hanging pendant lights but his face is as smooth as ever.

Everyone moves at once—Bellamy fanning out to circle behind their opponents, Raven’s hands slipping to where her weapons are hidden, Clarke striding, determined and fierce-faced, to where Cage stands as his legion ripples around him. The jumping man is at Clarke’s back, suddenly, and there’s something banded across her neck, hot and solid when she grabs at it.

All around her, the space echoes with sounds of fighting: the grunt of air being knocked from lungs, the crack of knuckles across cheekbones, the sharp hiss of recovery. Bellamy has one man lain on the ground, grappling to get hands and feet under him, and is blocking the blows of a woman glowing yellow and a man squat with strength as he backs them towards a wall. Raven ducks under the arm of a man as he swings and lunges for his ankle, yanking hard until he falls and she jabs two fingers against his windpipe while others step towards her, circling in on all sides. Cage is observing, barking orders at his soldiers and inching towards the steel door of the warehouse.

Clarke juts her elbow into the man behind her, hard; puts her weight behind her boot slamming into his instep; shifts until her leg locks behind his and she can swipe him down onto the ground. He scrabbles to sit up and she knocks a fist into his jaw so his chin snaps and he lays prone, a swell of redness blooming from the hit and his back pressing into the floor with each breath. She swings an arm out to catch another in the chest when too-quick feet shift in her periphery, hears them fall and doesn’t wait to see if they get back up.

“Clarke!” Bellamy’s voice rings out, booming and sharp in its reverberations, and she turns to find him with Cage trapped against his body and his three attackers lying prone behind him. Each of Bellamy’s arms loop under the other man’s to meet behind his neck and Cage is immobile in Bellamy's grasp. Clarke knows this is her way out, _knows_ it’s the best solution to a shitty problem as she reaches for the gun still held in place by her jeans, as she flips the safety and aims at Cage Wallace’s chest.

But then he breathes, the sound hanging raggedly in the air between them, his stomach flexing with the movement and a drop of blood falling from his nose and she’s suspended. Cage is _human_ , just one terribly fucked up man with a heart beating in his chest and she’s made too many of those stop.

She hears a sharp shout and looks over to see Raven with her foot pressed against the trachea of a woman bearing a slash across her cheek, her stun gun held up against the remaining three of Cage’s companions; the device holding them at a distance through some kind of invisible barrier as they grit teeth and fight against it, snarling with their eyes locked on Raven. When Clarke looks back to Bellamy, his eyes are boring into her, brown depths wide and sharp and urging and she knows what they’re doing, knows what he’s saying.

There is her and Cage and these people she _loves_ and these people possessed to fight until they can’t and there is one way to end it. And there is Bellamy telling her they’re in it together. She knows she can’t hurt him, knows the bullet won’t pierce his skin and that he’d be willing to risk it if it could and she hates every second of it but she has to stop this, has to stop blood from spilling onto another unassuming person’s hands at the mercy of Cage’s curiosity or wrath.

Clarke braces her body and fires.

The bullet flies directly into Cage’s chest and Clarke feels the recoil reverberate through her arms, knock her joints in their place, feels her arm fall by her side. Bellamy lets Cage slide down as he steps back, holding the man's head until he can lower it to the ground, and Clarke stares. Cage’s chest is still moving, blood still flowing out of the wound she inflicted as his heart pumps underneath it, and her eyes fixate on the deep red spread across the floor, watching the edges of it shift and change under his garbled breaths. When he stills, the silence pounds against her ears, through her racing blood, and she stands rooted for a moment.

Then Raven curses and it’s as though her vision zooms out, becomes aware that the world exists around her and is more than the dying—dead—man at her feet or the gunpowder on her hands. Frantically, Clarke’s eyes search Bellamy, tracing his chest for some sign of injury, some bloom of blood spurting from his skin, but finds only scattered droplets and a hole torn through the black cotton stretched across his chest. Raven is lowering her arm as Clarke scans her body, weight shifted onto her good leg more heavily than usual but otherwise unharmed as she moves warily, eying the people backing away from her and stirring on the floor who are looking around the warehouse with panic on their faces to make sure they’re truly out of Cage’s grasp.

They’re okay. They’re okay.

The gun drops from Clarke’s hands and she feels her fingers start shaking, shoves them into her pocket with enough force that the edges of the stitching threatens to pop. She’s forcing deep, even breaths into her lungs and looking everywhere in the warehouse except at Cage’s body when Bellamy’s hands fit themselves to her face, turn her to meet his gaze. He looks battle-weary, shoulders heavy and brow furrowed, but his eyes are clear as they burn into hers.

“Hey, you did good, okay? You did what you had to do.” His pinkie brushes across her jawline as he searches her face, words urgent and deep so they rumble against her chest. “We all did.”

She nods, closes her eyes, and leans a cheek into the warmth of his hands, into the safety of his presence and the pull of his body. His lips brush her forehead just before she’s tucked against his neck, arms holding each other up, breathing in the echo of each other’s pulse where they touch.

“What do we do now?” Raven asks, hands on her hips as she surveys the scene. The dust still floating in the air haloes her head and, for a moment, they all look angelic.

Clarke peers up at Bellamy, at the people still picking up their lives around them. “I guess we’ll figure it out.”

She listens as her heart keeps beating.

 

* * *

 

Later, the world grows quieter.

Clarke stands next to Bellamy and they fight for it, blood and tears and bodies clinging to each other in the dawn.

When the chaos settles, they make a home.

Peace is strange after years without it, and they relearn each other in the dark and when the light breaks across them with the morning. Clarke is already strong, has been for longer than she should have had to be, but with Bellamy, she can be everything else, too. She learns to be weak, and he learns to break. They pick each other up. Tucked onto the edge of the metro line with star-spattered hands always finding hers, she heals in pieces and they grow.

There’s a type of magic, she finds, in getting to live her life day after day; in being able to work and draw and wake up with limbs tangled together and have Bellamy’s body pressed into hers every evening. It’s hard, and it’s messy, and Clarke can’t quite believe that she gets to do it; that she gets to build a life with someone.

That she gets to want Bellamy and have him want her back.

It’s better than she ever could have pictured.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote something with a plot?? And "action"?? We're all amazed. A special thank you to [Hannah](http://teamquiche.tumblr.com/) and [Tierney](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness) for helping me make sure the timelines were at least largely comprehensible.
> 
> And thank you for reading! This world carved out a little place in my mind (and then got paused when the holiday madness started). You can come talk to me about it/find me with other fic-related things on tumblr [here](http://apanoplyoffic.tumblr.com/) and more generally [here](http://apanoplyofsong.tumblr.com/).


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